Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. On occasion, under rare circumstances, the stars align and things happen. Despite the odds, there are also lottery winners chosen regularly. That doesn't mean it's a feasible or repeatable strategy for success, or that it's a good idea for the multiple millions of lottery losers to keep playing in hopes that they, too, will eventually win.
Honestly, petitions fail the vast majority of the time because there are just too many mission-critical elements outside of the petitioning players' control. The licensor not be willing, the funding might not be there, the size of the spending audience might not be there, the technology might not be there, the dev team might already be busy with other projects, the slot in the release schedule might not be there, the executives in charge at the publisher might not be willing, the console generation might be about to turn over, and so on and so forth. There are so many separate individual pieces that must align for a specific project to get the green light. Any single one of them not being there spells doom for the project. Player enthusiasm is only a single piece of a much bigger puzzle.
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